I long ago gave up with inkjet printers. Every one I’ve ever had the misfortune of using has had problems of one sort or another, mainly due to clogged heads, knackered print-head belts, or - and here’s a shock - extortionately expensive ink cartridges. I print colour so very rarely that I invested in a black and white laser printer from HP (A Laserjet 1200) about five years ago, which has so far proved extremely reliable. I use a site like Photobox to print pictures, and get a top-quality image on decent paper in a day or two, at a great price per page too, without the hassle of an unreliable, over-marketed, low-quality inkjet printer.
It’s also been very good on the cartridge front. I’ve only just bought a replacement ink cartridge, and that was only about £40. Whilst I’m not exactly a heavy user, I’m printing company invoices, documents, travel tickets, maps and all sorts, so I’d suggest I’m about average. Five years of printing for £40 is the sort of price point I think most inkjet owners would have a sticky dream about, long after having mortgaged their house once more for that small plastic box containing as much ink as a fountain pen cartridge.
Recycling of computer equipment is a subject that recently hit the headlines (I think Apple got a bad wrap due to it’s weighting, when they’ve led computer recycling for a few years), but it’s been a problem for some years. I’ve had no joy since wondering how to recycle laptop batteries three years ago.
As I finally installed my new ink cartridge, I was delighted to see that HP have a recycling programme that encompasses laser printer cartridges too. So I’ve boxed up my old cartridge to send off with my post this week. We recycle a lot of our household waste - as much as we can in fact - and it’s good to see that HP are doing their bit in encouraging recycling. Hopefully their efforts aren’t ignored by the big corporations that no doubt make up the biggest proportion of their client base.
September 3rd, 2006 at 9:55 am
Yep, I know HP are globally respected as a manufacturer of pocket calculators, and I understand they make computers as well these days, but I have to admit they make excellent laser printers, and I would take a lot of persuasion to buy anything else.
I’ve had an HP laserjet 4ML for aeons - well 10 years at least - replacement toners are inexpensive, i’ve only had to replace the toner a few times in a decade, it does not jam etc.
I recently purchased an HP 3600n to print colour, and I have to say it is pretty whizzy, with a really low cost of ownership and knocks out 20ppm. Also it came with fully loaded toners rather than the part full offerings that other vendors sometimes supply in their printers. This makes a real difference because colour toners are quire costly.
However, I’m pretty anti HP as a computer vendor having had to administer HP workstations (they were called Bobcats for some reason) back in the early days of the Unix workstation. Nasty HP-UX operating system (referred to as H-Pukes at our site), no NFS, no BSD print spooling, bizzare file name length restrictions and a whole lot of other goodness that time and post traumatic stress disorder have conveniently wiped from my mempry. No wonder HP had to give them University I worked for because no-one in their right mind would have paid for them.
September 30th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
[...] The latter point proved to be the main gotcha - Whilst my laser printer (HP Laserjet 1200 as it happens) supports DL envelopes, I had all sorts of puzzling to go through when I discovered that the sample was skewed such that the right-hand side of the image was being missed. [...]